Today, Veeam has made available to our VCSP partners the RTM of Update 4 for Backup & Replication 9.5 (Build 9.5.4.2399). Update 4 is what we term a breaking update, meaning that if a Cloud Connect tenant upgrades from any previous 9.5 version before VCSPs this will break backup or replication functionality. With that in mind the RTM has been made available for our VCSP partners to ensure it is installed and tested before being pushed out to production before the GA release.

Veeam Backup & Replication releases from 9.0 (build 9.0.0.1715) can write backups via Cloud Connect to a cloud repository on 9.5 Update 4. For Cloud Connect Replication, existing Hardware Plan based replicas can go to a cloud host on 9.5 Update 4. To take advantage of the new vCloud Director based replication, tenants need to also be on Update 4.

As I detailed yesterday, there are a number of updates that need to be applied to Veeam ONE, Veeam Availability Console and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

VCSP Features and Enhancements:

Update 4 is a very significant update and contains a number of enhancements and known issue fixes with a lot of those enhancements aimed at improving the scalability of the Backup & Replication platform that VCSPs can take advantage of. One important note is around the new Instance-based licensing model that all VCSPs should be aware of. There is an initial guide here, information in the VCSP Forums and there will be emails sent to explain the changes.

vCloud Director support – Massive Feature Enhancement! Simplifies setting up Veeam based DRaaS for Service Provides with vCD, and enhances tenants experience with additional capabilities provided by vCD

Capacity Tier – Move tenant’s backup files as they age out of operational restore window to a cheaper storage – AWS S3, Azure Blob or on premises object storage

Gateway pools – Create and assign pools of cloud gateways to the tenants

Tenant to tape jobs – Cloud Connect backups can be written to tape with the hand of GFS media pool and Backup to Tape jobs

Tenant-driven password change – Tenants can now change the password they use to connect to the service provider by editing one on the registered service provider

There has also been a lot of work to improve and enhance scalability in the Backup & Replication Cloud Connect functionality to accomodate the increasing usage of Veeam Agent for Windows and Linux of which there is a new version (3.0) coming at the same time of Update 4 GA. For Veeam Availability Console, Update 4 will be taken advantage of fully in the upcoming major release a little later after the Update 4 GA.

Conclusion:

Once again, Update 4 for Veeam Backup & Replication is an important update to apply for VCSPs running Cloud Connect services in preparation for the GA release which will happen in about two weeks at our Velocity event. Once released I’ll link to the VeeamKB for a detailed look at the fixes but for the moment, if you have the ability to download the update do so and have it applied to your instances. For more info in the RTM, head to the VCSP Forum post here.